http://traffic.libsyn.com/sedaily/ThumbtackInfrastructure.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download Thumbtack is a marketplace for real-world services. On Thumbtack, people get their house painted, their dog walked, and their furniture assembled. With 40,000 daily marketplace transactions, the company handles significant traffic. On yesterday’s episode, we explored how one aspect of Thumbtack’s marketplace recently changed, going from asynchronous matching to synchronous “instant” matching. In this episode, we zoom out to the larger architecture of

http://traffic.libsyn.com/sedaily/ThumbtackMarketplaceEvolution.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download The labor market is moving online. Taxi drivers are joining Uber and Lyft. Digital freelancers are selling their services through Fiverr. Experienced software contractors are leaving contract agencies to join Gigster. Online labor marketplaces create market efficiency by improving the communications between buyers and sellers. Workers make their own hours, and their performance is judged by customers and algorithms, rather than the skewed

http://traffic.libsyn.com/sedaily/FiverrEngineering.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download As the gig economy grows, that growth necessitates innovations in the online infrastructure powering these new labor markets. In our previous episodes about Uber, we explored the systems that balance server load and gather geospacial data. In our coverage of Lyft, we studied Envoy, the service proxy that standardizes communications and load balancing among services. In shows about Airbnb, we talked about the

http://traffic.libsyn.com/sedaily/Gigster.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download You have heard the phrase: every company is becoming a software company. An insurance company is now supposed to turn into a software company that sells insurance. A clothing retailer needs to reinvent itself to be able to build software to manage the production and distribution of its clothing. Software applications provide so much leverage to an organization, it seems smart to develop

http://traffic.libsyn.com/sedaily/InstacartDataScience.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download Instacart is a grocery delivery service. Customers log onto the website or mobile app and pick their groceries. Shoppers at the store get those groceries off the shelves. Drivers pick up the groceries and drive them to the customer. This is an infinitely complex set of logistics problems, paired with a rich data set given by the popularity of Instacart. Jeremy Stanley is

http://traffic.libsyn.com/sedaily/roundtable_edited.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download Suddenly, automation is changing our world faster than anyone anticipated. For technologists, the world is becoming convenient and high-leverage. For non-technologists, the job market is evaporating. Haseeb Qureshi and Quincy Larson join me for a roundtable discussion on automation, jobs, and artificial intelligence. Haseeb and I have had numerous discussions about this topic before, and Quincy is the founder of Free Code Camp,

http://traffic.libsyn.com/sedaily/scaleapi_edited1.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download Some tasks are simple, but cannot be performed by a computer. Audio transcription, image recognition, survey completion–these are simple procedures that almost any human could execute, but the machine learning models have not gotten consistent enough to do them accurately. Scale is an API for human labor, created by Lucy Guo and Alexandr Wang. Similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk, Scale sends small, simple